Love Under Glasse

by Kristina Meister

  El chewed her lip. “But . . . how do you do it?”

  “You sign up online, go to a testing center, show your ID, and take the test.”

  Show her ID. Her real ID. If she did that, there might be a way her mother could track her. That was something El couldn’t allow for another six months at least. Fine. In six months, when she was an adult, she’d walk into a testing center and take the GED exam. Maybe there was a book or something she could find to help her study.

  The brief happiness subsided as it occurred to her she didn’t have a place to be for six months. She didn’t even have a tent to camp in.

  Doc used an automotive tool to pull the tiny fragments of rock out of her knee, mopping the fresh blood with wet wipes. His voice had a soothing rumble to it as he dropped it to what seemed to be, for him, a whisper. “You know, there’s lots of shelters for young people. I lived in one. Some have programs for GED too. Give you two meals, a place to shower. They even do health care if you need it. And most of the time you don’t need identification. It’s a great service for kids who have nowhere to go.”

  El swallowed. A huge knowing eye peeped at her knee through a magnifying glass.

  “Thing is, some people were never meant to be parents. Sometimes they do it because they’re bored. Sometimes to fix a marriage. Sometimes by accident. And sometimes they do it because they think they’re supposed to.”

  She couldn’t help the snort that erupted. When he winked at her, relief finally came. For the first time in a few hours, she took a lungful of fresh air and let it out slowly. “Sounds like you’ve met my mother.”

  “Yeah? She an alcoholic too?”

  “Among other things. She’s also a snob, a religious fanatic, a Tea Party member, a racist, and a homophobe.”

  He made a face and pasted her knee with Band-Aids. “I’m guessing she isn’t your best buddy?”

  “She’s a terrible person.”

  El took his hand as he helped her to her feet. Testing her weight on it, the knee felt much better. Already it seemed less hot and the irritating itch had gone away completely. She hobbled in a circle and decided to take another risk. She was El the Daredevil, after all.

  “If I’d stayed with my family, they would have sent me to a reeducation camp to learn how not to be a lesbian.”

  The sneezer let out a whistle. “That’s fucked. Dude, you remember Sid from Boot? She said she got put in one of those, and they had a psych guy tell her she had some kind of mental disorder. Gave her Ritalin. Zonked her out like a heroin addict.”

  El wobbled, but Doc’s hand shot out to steady her. “Yeah. I remember her. Isn’t she married?”

  “Yeah. Her wife’s name is Carrie, I think.”

  “Good for her.”

  Feeling like a show pony being put through the paces, El let go of her trainer and sat down. The idea that in some parts of the world it was acceptable by law for her to marry like any other person, invite guests, eat cake, and have a certificate was just astonishing. Tired as she was, her thoughts were uninhibited and before long, she was imagining what Riley would look like wearing a white leather motorcycle coat.

  Doc sat beside her and ate one of her french fries as if to poke fun at her. “So who’s the girl? I mean, there’s a girl, yeah? You have a look on your face.”

  Riley wasn’t a girl. Riley was a demon. El’s demon, possessing her heart so easily that it took barely a word to summon forth a memory, and from the memory spilled the devotional. What she felt, there was no containing, and for days she’d kept herself from her one outlet. Her miseries were piled up so high she’d been bricked off from the thought of how much she missed Riley Vanator.

  “Where to begin,” she murmured.

  Doc smiled and pushed her plate toward her. “Start with and then I saw her. That’s my favorite part.”

  Riley kicked off her boots and collapsed backward onto the bed. The sheet-covered trampoline bounced her back off in a cloud of dust, but she stuck the landing and took it as a sign that there was no rest for the clever. Her body was so heavy she could barely trudge into the bathroom and peel off her armor. Instead of a shower, she soaked in the tiny, chipped bathtub that thankfully had water so hot it could brew tea. She ordered a pizza and set up her tech station, flipping through all the programs at the sluggish speed of the motel’s tragic wi-fi.

  El had replied to her warning exactly as expected. And she had no idea how to respond.

  Who are you?

  For her dad, she was a continuation of her mother’s sacred legacy, handled with mingled joy, sorrow, and deference. For Abuela, she was the replacement daughter that somehow didn’t match up because she was too much like her daddy. For everyone else, she was that obnoxious bitch who wouldn’t leave things alone. But without all those people, without their ideas of her, she honestly wasn’t really clear which parts of her were constants. She had a small list of irrevocable character traits, but ever since the start of senior year, she’d been wondering what would happen if she magically blipped into another universe where the rules were different. Would she have to suddenly learn to be nice, polite, less intense?

  Everyone who’d been to it acted like college was one of those places where suddenly social dynamics went topsy turvy, and intellect was all that mattered. They talked as if a person could be unique or eccentric and it was just kind of taken in stride. People embraced fringe ideas, opened their minds a little, started using their newly acquired votes. People stopped picking on one another, jockeying for position, and started being peers.

  All Riley’s skills had to do with getting out of trouble or fucking with people, and that only applied to college if she wanted to be the resident forgery expert or a serial prankster.

  When she looked in the mirror, Riley knew who she had been, but with all her unspoken words, El had changed everything. El said she wanted to know the girl who needed to take a deep breath in silence. She wanted to make a world that didn’t put Riley in those corners and force her to kick her way out of them. She wanted to see who Riley could be if she had everything as she wanted it. It seemed like El wanted the same thing for Riley that Riley had entertained briefly before a summary dismissal. She wanted Riley to relax.

  Riley wasn’t exactly sure if she knew how to do that.

  Who was she?

  The phone rang. At a glance, all the uncoiled muscle torqued back into readiness. Setting up the apps on her phone, she answered the call on the laptop and let her fingers wander to Tizóna. Opening and closing that blood-streaked blade, she felt somehow stronger, more focused. She’d always seen her mind like a sharp edge she could release from a scabbard, embed into a problem, and slip out with only a whisper of a sign. Knowing that the knife had already saved El once, gave it even more power.

  Riley answered the witch’s call with a smile. “Well, hello! I was just about to call you for your debriefing. Wanted to make sure you weren’t busy.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It wasn’t a joke.”

  “Really? That’s new. Aren’t you always jokin’? Isn’t that your . . . thing? Aren’t you the one who thinks everythin’ is a big fuckin’ joke?”

  Riley closed the blade and opened it again. Something wasn’t right about the voice. Mama always had the tone of a pleasant tigress looking at the bars as if to calculate how much force had to be applied to eat every small, cooing child in the vicinity. At the moment, the woman seemed frantic and was cutting the edge of that anxiety with her usual medication.

  A glass clinked against what sounded like a bottle. “Are you laughin' at me? Hmm? Did you read it and think I deserve it? Such ungrateful . . . mindless . . . bitter lies!”

  Riley’s brows went into her hot pink hairline. “I haven’t read anything. I just now got to a hotel. Look at the card records, you can probably see the pending charge.”

  Without even bothering to fully finish her gulp, Mama launched into a fluid tirade between coughs. Every other sentence was a prayer to some deity Riley
had never met or angels she hoped she never would. Gathering the gist together as if plucking lentils from cinders, she went to El’s blog and within a few lines, let out a low whistle.

  “Holy. Shit.” Her grin was so huge it hurt. She skimmed over the absolute devastation that lay before her—the story of a girl held captive in a golden castle, her hands tied with ribbons and her body sold to princes. A young lady with a mind like razor wire, dulled with Bible verses and potions. A woman with passion and ferocity, bound by illusions of normalcy, but unafraid to finally and forever cut herself free of all of it. El’s heart had bled pixels and the words were terrifyingly sharp. Sharp enough to cut down a witch, no matter how powerful she thought she was.

  All that held this incantation in check was the name. One name could summon the assailant to account. Its absence echoed through the readers’ comments on the entry. Who had done this? Who were Snow’s parents? How could this be happening?

  Didn’t they say that to destroy a demon, you had to know its name?

  Riley ran her tongue ring against her teeth and knew that whoever she had seemed in all those timid encounters, El had always been one hell of a chick.

  “Goddamn, lady!”

  “You see? You understand, don’t you? She could ruin me, ruin us, ruin her sister! Oh my god, Rose’s wedding! Oh, this is horrible! She just doesn’t care about anyone but herself! She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s gone insane!”

  Riley let out an explosive cackle. “Guess you shouldn’t have fucked with her, huh?”

  The silence stretched and the wine glass was refilled in a succession of clinks. Riley kept count on the hotel notepad of how many times the bottle had touched the rim.

  “You guttersnipe piece of white—”

  The H hit Riley’s nerves and got a knee-jerk interruption. “Latina, ¡Métetelo por el culo, Mamahuevo! Escuchame. La familia de mi mama son de Mexico, y hablo español también. Claro?”

  “Wetback, then.”

  Riley hissed. “Where are your people from, huh, Mama? You’re white as herring, so you must be from Europe, right? Is that nearer or farther from the United States than Mexico? Before you answer, Mexico used to own half this country.”

  Mama snorted. “Oh, sure, but your people don’t own it now.”

  “They do, actually, seeing as how we’re citizens, but okay, keep up the racist rhetoric. That really helps me sympathize with you.”

  The line sang with the tinkling ice. A quiet sobbing began, dainty and ladylike. It put Riley’s teeth on edge, but she let it continue and tallied another drink.

  “All I’ve evuh done, was for my babies. I quit school to help their father get his law degree. I wined and dined his cronies! I told him to run for office! I did that! This house, the servants, the lifestyle, it’s all me! I did this! And she throws it back in my face! I don’t understand what’s wrong with her!”

  Riley tilted the chair and put her feet up on the table. “Not one damn thing. She’s exactly how you made her.”

  “That is not my child. She is not what I made! The Devil took her from me!”

  Riley sighed, all her ire suddenly anesthetized. It was an intractable situation—this woman would never be able to see the twisted logic at play, because logic wasn’t real to her. “Or . . . the Devil took you long before she was born. That ever cross your mind? Would God really want you to hate your own child?”

  “I don’t hate my daughter.”

  “Yes, you do.” Riley set Tizóna down and crossed her arms. “All these problems came from you trying to turn her into something you thought she should be, instead of just waiting to see. If you loved who and what she is, the thought of changing her would never occur to you. And to be honest—”

  “She’s my—”

  “To be honest, you’d fight anyone who wanted to change her. But you didn’t, did you? You let the world, you let the church, you let God tell you who your daughter should be without ever once listening to her!”

  Mama gasped, but Riley wasn’t going to apologize.

  “You made a child, lady! She grew inside you. She came from your body, and you let other people tell you she was ugly. You had one fucking job—to defend her, to fight! And you failed! You let her down, and that was before you ever threw your derby hat into the enemy’s ring. Once that happened you betrayed her again. Every day you’re betraying your motherly duty.”

  The bottle hit the floor and bounced in a bell-like tone, rolling along the stone floor of Mama’s castle. As Riley listened, another cork squeaked loose and freed a fresh batch of curses.

  “You don’t even have children. And where’s your mother?”

  “Dead.”

  “He kill her? Your jailbird father?”

  Riley’s hands clenched, but there on the screen, just below El’s sorrowful autobiography, was the balm she needed—the first reply El had given her. El didn’t want her to fight. That was why she’d set out to transform herself.

  El trusted her.

  “My mother died of cancer.”

  “So she didn’t have to live to see what you turned into. Lucky her.”

  It had all begun with that ending. If her mother hadn’t died, Riley would have been a different person altogether. Maybe a bit similar, but not as ready to hold a knife.

  She picked up the pen and marked the count as Mama swam in her own desperation.

  It was all true, but that wasn’t the end of the story. She was bigger than a reaction to everything around her. She knew she was, and so Riley calmed her temper and got to the point.

  “Did you really pay Jay to sleep with her?”

  “Oh, puh-lease!”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I paid him to date her, because she was so fuckin’ awkward not a single boy would touch her!”

  “That’s because she prefers women,” Riley said softly. She wanted to be angry. She wanted to cuss the bitch out and hang up, but that wasn’t her mission, and if she was honest with herself, she didn’t have it in her. Finally, she understood why it was easier for El to run. Guilt and shame and backhanded apologies were the blood and bone of the abuser, and Mama was by every cell a monstrosity.

  “How can she possibly know if she’s a lesbian if she hasn’t fucked a man? I mean, really!”

  “The same way you knew you were straight, assuming of course you ever knew that about yourself.”

  Mama spat the wine with a sound like a gurgling jackal. “That is dis-gust-in’!”

  “I’m a lesbian. To me, it’s normal and completely understandable. You get that, right? If you came out to me, I’d be chill. Things would make sense actually, in a fucked-up way.”

  “Oh, you can put your painted ass right behind me, you harlot of Babylon.”

  Riley sighed and glanced at the seconds ticking down. “So was it just a bonus? I mean when Jay decided to pin her down, get a little nut on the side? Was that just like, added benefit, maybe help El realize she was actually straight?”

  “She should be thankin’ me!” Mama hiccuped and had to cough to regain her voice. “Think about it. She feels . . . gay or whateva. She can’t be sure! She has sex with him and she suddenly is. Doesn’t say much for him, but he’s a teenager. When they get married, he’ll get practice.”

  Riley would’ve facepalmed if it wouldn’t have been audible. “The blog entry says that she didn’t give consent, but held her tongue because she didn’t want you to punish her. Is that the kind of situation you wanted her to be in?” Riley chose her words with the mind of a mechanic, piecing a machine together. One day that engine was going to turn on and convert Mama’s life into exhaust. “I know Jay. He’s a bully.”

  “Maybe to people like you.”

  Riley leaned back with a satisfied smile. “You mean people like your daughter, right? Lesbians.”

  “Jay is a good boy.”

  “Sure he is.”

  “Elyrra is so selfish. I cannot believe her!”

  “Do you ever tak
e responsibility for how you feel?”

  Mama slurred. It took Riley a moment to understand her garbled, “What are you tryin’ to say?”

  “It’s everyone else but you. At least that’s what you say in every single one of your interviews and vlogs. It’s the immigrants, it’s the gays, it’s the other party. Never you. Which helps you feel superior, sure, but it also makes you a nagging weight around people’s necks.”

  “I don’t pay you to be my therapist.”

  Still smiling, Riley shook her head. “Shit, I hope you pay someone to, ’cause you are one mint julep away from drinking mouthwash, lady.”

  “I’m just fine, thank you.”

  “Look, I have to get to sleep. Do you want me to tell you what I found, or not?”

  The ice jangled in the glass as Riley imagined Mama waving her arm for emphasis. “Why do you think I called?”

  “El was attacked. I think she may have been seriously injured.” Her eyes went to her phone screen and watched the little readout as it jumped and leapt with each sound.

  “Wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t run away. Serves her right, really.”

  “You can press charges if you want. I know who he is, and he’s an adult.”

  “Your job is to find my daughter, or are you incapable of focusin’ on that task?”

  “Oh, I think I’m doing fine. I’ve tracked her to Iowa.”

  “Iowa?” This seemed to surprise Mama. Her voice sharpened a bit, surfacing from the Southern drawl just long enough to hint at her partial Ivy League education. “The other team only got as far as Ohio.”

  With a chuckle, Riley flipped through her programs and found the cell phone. It was parked beside a highway in Indiana. She’d outpaced them by a state’s width, but they had four drivers. They could easily catch back up. All she could hope was that El had figured out contacting her friend via phone was a bad idea. Unless they decided to simply drive straight through and try to beat El to her destination, they were probably following the same bus route Riley was.

  “Yeah, I bumped into them. Nice guys even if they are a bit stupid. They bought me breakfast.”